Spotify now available in The Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Spotify now available in The Netherlands

spotify.com

26 pointsbluppy211 comments

Great news! Also, they introduced a new plan: Spotify Unlimited. For half the price of the Premium plan you will be able to listen to unlimited amounts of ad-free music. You won't get offline playlist support or access to the mobile version.

On a related note: if Spotify were to become massively popular in the Netherlands, its social features that rely on Facebook might spell big trouble for the dominant dutch social network Hyves. I wouldn't be surprised if the good folks at Hyves HQ are frantically trying to come up with a great way to share Spotify's music through their network as well. Question ofcourse is: will that even come close to the social integration the Spotify client will be able to provide...

While the social features do use Facebook, I wouldn't say that it relies on them. If you know someone with username X, you can search for spotify:user:X to find their user-page. The facebook-integration "just" automates finding your friends for you.

Yes indeed, good point.

How would you share tracks with a friend that's not on facebook though? You won't be able to just drag&drop, as this doesn't work to a user's profile-view. Right?

It should work with drag and drop by dragging a track to the user on the People list on the right. You can also right-click on a track, Send to, Spotify People, pick a user

Ehm yes, I know how the social component of the client is supposed to work. We were talking about users that don't show up because they have not connected with their facebook account.

So: how do you get a 'spotify:user:x' user in the people list so you can share tracks with that particular user?

If the user has enabled social features, you can just enter "spotify:user:x" in the search-field. But now that you mention it, I realized that user x has to connect to Facebook to enable the social features. That is unfortunate.

I was thinking more of users that one is not a "friend" with on Facebook, but that one still wanted to share music with/see playlists from. Like the spotify:users:spotify company user.

EDIT: After some help, I learned that if one cancels connecting with Facebook, then the social features will be activated without requiring a Facebook account.

I'm not sure whether the new plan is a good idea or not. (Spotify Unlimited - cheaper than premium, you get unlimited adfree use but you can't use offline features or run it on phones). Multiple plans confuse the user; think about the billions of different Windows editions. Best to keep it simple; the existing "you either pay or not" plan model was simple and elegant.

We had a great discussion about the fallacy of having too many plans on HN maybe about a year ago, unfortunately I can't find it though. The point was: it seems like when users face a non-trivial choice, they are more likely to simply back off and not chose anything at all.

I disagree. I don't have a fancy mobile phone and I'm unlikely to ever be at a PC without an internet connection. £5 for unlimited ad-free music is perfect for me. In fact I just signed up and didn't even have to pause my music for it to recognise my purchase. Sometimes too many plans can be confusing but I don't think Spotify really could have made it simpler.

1. When I click buy I get an error that the security certificate is invalid

2. It would be nice to be able to view the clip associated with the song

3. I have a pretty high resolution. In a list of songs the first 10% of horizontal space is "Track". Most of the song titles don't fit in that space. Meanwhile 70% of the space is unused on the right. It's easy to fix by hand, but it would still be nice if it automatically adapted to screen size. You have to manually drag "Track" wider in every different view.

Very good UI overall.

If you have a problem when signing up, it is likely due to the postcode format. Use the format "1234AA" (without space).

I've been using Spotify for months with a UK VPN, I'm really hoping they can get it launched in North America soon.

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